Content Marketing Measurement and How To Show Impact With Content Metrics

Daniel Hochuli
APAC CONTENT MARKETING
MANAGER at LinkedIn
Showing
Impact with
content
marketing
@logocracycopy /danhochuli

A roadmap &
tools to set up
your reporting
How audiences
used content and
our expectations
in the funnel
What you will take away from this slideshare
An
understanding
of the value in
Vanity Metrics
The hidden revenue
potential from
audiences attracted
by Content
Marketing
Daniel Hochuli @logocracycopy

O N E . T W O . T H R E E . F O U R .
Why Showing
Impact is
essential
Content
Optimisation
Metrics
Subscriber
Audience
Metrics
Customer
Acquisition
Metrics
A G E N D A
F I V E .
Showing
Impact to
decision
makers

You will fail to
properly measure the
impact of content, if
you don’t have these
four elements in place
in your organisation
Understanding your
audience’s behaviours
and the customer journey
Knowledge
Analytics tools
customized for your
business goals
Tools
A culture of testing and
experimentation and
comprehension of the
brand’s strategic direction
Culture
A strategic vision and
agreement from all
stakeholders on the
metrics and goals
valuable to the marketing
efforts.
Goals

Why Showing Impact is
essential
ONE

W H Y W E M U S T S H O W
I M P A C T
To prove the contribution content has on the
sales pipeline and business revenue.
Daniel Hochuli @logocracycopyPART 1: Why Showing Impact Is Essential

If showing impact were easy, we’d all look like
superstars.
But it’s not.
Proper measurement is really complicated.
It takes time, intelligent guesswork and the
right metrics.

We are all struggling with proving ROI because:
 True ROI takes time (perhaps years) to be
accurately useful.
 We use vanity metrics to report ROI. However,
that’s not what they should be used for.
 Most marketers are not customizing their
analytics platforms.

Structuring your reports
Our biggest challenge is in
‘measuring ROI’ but most of
us don’t use ‘Conversion
and Revenue’ in our
reporting.
Most of us use
‘Engagement’ to measure
success, which is why we
struggle with content
measurement.

Structuring your reports
Why is ‘Traffic’ so
important? It’s not.
Traffic is not a true
indicator of ROI

THE NEXT SLIDE IS AN IMPORTANT ONE!
(will frame up the three key areas of reporting)

Three Key Metric Pillars of Showing Impact
VANITY
METRICS
Likes, Shares, Comments
Followers
Impressions (Reach) CPM
Awareness
Traffic & CTR
Views
ROI
METRICS
Click Through Rate (CTR)
(sometimes)
Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
Transactions
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
SUBSCRIBER
METRICS
Subscribers
Cadence
Marketing Goals
Revenue from content assets
and content customers

Mapping these Metric Pillars to the Customer Journey
Measured by
Audience platforms
Audience platforms include any platform that has an
audience you don’t own but want to attract with content:
social media, native advertising, affiliates, print, tv, radio,
inbound
Measured by
Analytics / CRM Tool
Like
Click /
CTR
MQL SQL
Impression /
CPM
Share /
Earned Reach
Comments /
Sentiment /
Engagement
Traffic
On-page
Engagement
Sale /
Transaction
Subscriber
Loyalty
Engagement
ROI METRICS
(aka customer acquisition metrics)
SUBSCRIBER METRICS
(aka Content Marketing metrics)
VANTIY METRICS
(aka content optimisation metrics)
If we follow the customer journey along the buyer funnel, we see where the three metric pillars are placed.

Content Optimisation Metrics
What vanity metrics are really for…
TWO
Daniel Hochuli @logocracycopyPART 2: Content Optimisation Metrics

How we use Vanity Metrics
VANITY
METRICS
 Likes
 Shares
 Comments
 Followers
 Impressions (Reach)
 Traffic
 Views
As marketers, we use vanity metrics because they are both easy to obtain and help us
show others in our organisation that we are providing immediate value.
In other words, we use them for quick and cheap reporting.
 Clicks
 Hearts
 CPM
 Emojis
 Upvotes
 Retweets
 Saves

Stop using vanity metrics incorrectly!

Use vanity metrics to optimize your future content, not
to measure ROI.
The purpose of a vanity metric is to inform us how to
optimise our content for the audience we want to attract
- We should be calling them ‘Content Optimization
Metrics’.
PART 2: Content Optimisation Metrics

Data Insights Action DeliveryHypothesis
One way to use vanity metrics properly is in A/B
testing
Measure the number of engagements from content, compared to
a similar piece of content. Which performed better? This will help
you create more relevant content for that audience on that
platform.

Version B: Image featuring deviceVersion A: Image featuring person
Version A is WINNER!
160% Higher CTR
Example: Which headline resonates with the audiences on LinkedIn?
Insight:
The metric of ‘Click Through Rate’ informs us that our LinkedIn audience
engages better with content that contains people.
Use this knowledge to make more relevant future content.

Below Average
CTR
Impressions
Reach Hypothesis: We are not reaching the right audience
Impression Frequency
Hypothesis: Our target audience has not been adequately
nurtured
Hypothesis: We are reaching the wrong audience too
frequently
Clicks
Engaged Members
Hypothesis: Our content isn’t valuable
Hypothesis: Our updates are not well constructed
Clicks Per Engaged
Member
Hypothesis: We are not providing engaged members
with enough new content
Or use vanity metrics to illuminate problems in your campaigns.
“Houston, we
have a
problem”
Vanity metrics that help us
identify the problem?
Sub-metrics that
cause the problem
Using vanity metrics to
hypothesize potential solutions

C r e a t e t h e t e s t i n g c u l t u r e
As you get better at optimizing and A/B testing your
content, you will build better messaging and attract a
better quality of audience.

Metric Objectives KPIs LinkedIn Product
Content
Optimization
Bucket
Grow Brand Awareness
Establish a lasting position in the marketing
place by building an engaged audience for the
brand
 Share of voice
 Impressions
 Views on posts
 Shares
 Secondary network shares
(earned media)
 Total social actions
 Total attention time
 Positive sentiment comments
 Traffic / Pageviews
 Showcase Pages
 Company Pages
 Slideshare
 Sponsored Content
 Sponsored InMail
 Text Ads
 Retargeting
Thought Leadership
Build a reputation as a trusted leader with
industry expertise that serves as a differentiating
factor
 Influencer mentions/shares
 Share of voice
 Total attention time
 Avg. time on page
 Engagement rate
 Showcase Pages
 Company Pages
 Slideshare
 Publishing
Brand Sentiment
Improve the opinion of the brand among the
target audience over time.
 Sentiment scoring by channel.
Influencer, time period.
 Comments
 Impressions
 Showcase Pages
 Company Pages
 Slideshare
 Publishing
Some ‘content optimisation’ metrics to use to report common goals.

Customer Acquisition Metrics
Addressing and building a platform to answer ‘The ROI
Problem’
THREE
Daniel Hochuli @logocracycopyPART 3: Customer Acquisition Metrics

Top metrics to measure ROI
ROI
METRICS
 Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
 Marketing Qualified Leads
(MQLs)
 Transactions
 Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
These metrics show us the true ROI of our content efforts because they relate directly to the
behaviours and goals that impact the revenue of a business. If ROI is what you are chasing, then you
need to be measuring these. However, these are not quick and easy metrics to measure.
You need to manually set up your measurement for it to be effective

W h a t y o u n e e d t o b u i l d b e f o r e u s i n g
R O I m e t r i c s
Define & Agree on Your Post-Click Goals
Set up Goal Tracking
Set up a Goal Value
Step up Campaign Tags
Test & Measure Attribution Models
(only possible if you are measuring acquisition)
Before you hit
publish
After you hit
publish
Measure Acquisition
(only possible if you do all the tasks above)
Test and learn around
Lead Score & True
ROI
Setting up parameters for
ROI
Connect goal actions to your automation/sales system
Define Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
(Only possible if you have a working Attribution model – that has run for a
long time)

W h a t p l a t f o r m s s h o u l d y o u u s e t o s e t u p t r a c k i n g ?
Define & Agree on Your Post-Click Goals
Set up Goal Tracking
Set up Goal Value
Step up Campaign Tags
Before you
hit publish

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/critical-goal-types/
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032415?hl=en
Setting up goals in Google Analytics
Setting a goal in your analytics platform is the most important
step in discovering ROI.
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/google-analytics-goal-values/
When to use Goal Values
Assigning a goal value takes some intelligent guess work, but will help you
understand the potential ROI from content like whitepapers and webinars
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
Setting up Campaign Tags
Setting custom campaign tags allows you to accurately trace
which campaigns create conversions. It also overrides some of
the tracking issues in vanilla Google Analytics.
HOW TO SET UP TRACKING IN
GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Setting up goal tracking into your analytics platform allows you to understand how your marketing campaigns are
tied to business goals (ROI).
The above image shows LinkedIn and Slideshare, despite having less traffic, are better converters than Facebook.
Optimize your budgets accordingly.

Now that you are effectively tracking your conversions
You next need to figure out which channels perform
best at each stage of the customer journey.
Enter Attribution…

Some different attribution models
First -Touch
100% credit to the first action
a person took before making
a purchase.
Facebook 
100% 100%
33% 33% 33%
Multi-Touch
Weighted across all the touch
points a person took before
making a purchase.
Last -Touch
100% credit to the last action
a person took before making
a purchase.
Algorithmic/AI
An algorithm weighs and
judges actions and paths.
17% 54% 29%
Email  Organic Search  $$$

First Touch
Last Touch
Multi Touch
Pros Cons
 The easiest to calculate
 Shows what is the best short term
conversion driver
 Shows conduit channels, not
convincer channels
 Shows what is the best first touch
driver useful for attracting new
audiences
 Many customer touch points dilute its
value
 Many customer touch points dilute its
value
 Difficult to determine true first touch
across multiple devices, limited cookie
tracking
 Most accurate attribution across
the funnel
 Generates the truest real world
channel value
 Can be extremely complicated to set
up
 Difficult to determine true value
across multiple devices, limited
cookie tracking

It is easier to measure final touch, but it’s inaccurate. Easy is not
better.
You should work towards a multi-touch / algorithmic attribution
model.
https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/multi-channel-attribution-modeling-good-bad-ugly-models/

Understanding attribution takes time and intelligent
guesswork to discover the model that shows the truest
nature of the buyer journey.
Part of this process is determining when a customer is
ready to buy. This action needs you to manually set up
a Customer Lead Score that is unique to your brand.

Ways to identify a ‘Customer’ with Lead Scoring
User actions
 Completes a transaction goal
(purchase product)
 Completes a transactional intent
goal (sign for free trial)
 Clicks on a product Call To Action
(CTA)
Additional Indicators
 Downloads from multiple
company members
 Attends product-related events
 Responds positively to
prospecting (InMail)
Come up with a weighting for each action. Marketo awards
Critical behaviors 10 to 15 points, Important behaviors 5 to 9,
and merely Influencing behavior 1 to 4 points.

MOZ on how content and lead scoring found better leads
“It’s been my experience that folks who have to tie content directly to acquisitions, especially
short-term, are fighting a losing, nearly-impossible battle when talking content.
Whiteboard Friday itself, to get a little meta, was a multi-year content investment that took
time from multiple team members, creativity, investments in hardware, a dedicated room at our
offices, lighting setups, editing time, and much more. It didn't prove its worth in terms of ROI for
literally years, but today, I'd say that in the 8 years of WB Friday, we've turned it into one of
the highest ROI marketing activities at Moz period.”
– Rand Fishkin
Lead scoring helped MOZ understand that only those who visited their site content 8
times or more from content were considered valuable.

Once you have set up conversion tracking, an
attribution model and lead scoring, you will be highly
effective at measuring the true ROI from your
marketing campaigns.
Over time this will reveal your Customer Lifetime
Value (CLTV).

To recap, true measurement is not a quick fix!
It takes a long time to generate an accurate data pool to
identify the right attribution, lead scoring and CLTV but
you can speed up the process with effective A/B Testing.

Metric Objectives KPIs LinkedIn Products
Customer
Acquisition
Bucket
Lead Generation
Create content that drives high-quality leads.
 Lead conversions
 Avg. lead score
 Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)
 Sales-qualified leads (SQLs)
 Cost per customer
 Time to conversion
 Click through rate (CTR) for
nurture emails
 Showcase Pages
 Company Pages
 Slideshare
 Text Ads
 Conversion Tracking
Customer conversion
Generating immediate customers from content
and marketing material
 Transactions attributed to content
 Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
 Text Ads
 Conversion Tracking
 Retargeting
Customer retention
Maintaining cadence and loyalty content to
generate repeat clientele
 Returning visitor rate by SQLs
 Time to conversion
 Cost per customer
 Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
 Lifetime Customer Value (LCV)
 Upsell / Onsell
 Showcase Pages
 Company Pages
 Publishing
 Retargeting
Some ‘ROI’ metrics to use to report common goals.

Subscriber Audience
Metrics
Creating new revenue streams with
content
FOUR
Daniel Hochuli @logocracycopyPART 4: Subscriber Audience Metrics

Top metrics to measure Subscribers
 Subscribers (and those who act like
subscribers)
 Retention rate / cadence
 Revenue from the ‘content product’
FACT: Most people who consume your content will not (and may never) become customers.
In general, content should touch a broader audience than your customers. It should help those who
influence your customers, your advocates, your competitors, partners, employees, influencers in your
industry.
Content is about building an audience and the best way to measure this is by counting the number of
subscribers you acquire.
Once you have subscribers, you need to figure out how to monetize them….
SUBSCRIBER
METRICS

J o e P u l i z z i ,
C o n t e n t M a r k e t i n g I n s t i t u t e
“The number one job of the content we create is
not to sell a product, but to grow or maintain an
audience. Attracting subscribers is the most
important metric for most content.”

Traditional marketing
is focused on brand
Content Marketing is about
leveraging new media to build
trust around audience needs

Advertising
ONLY CONVERTS, DOES
NOT CONVINCE
Content Marketing
Campaign-Based
Capture immediate opportunities
Product focused
Customers
Interruptive
Captures Attention
Always-On
Compounds opportunities
Audience focused
Subscribers & Customers
Native
Builds Trust & Experiences
CONVINCES AND CONVERTS

With content, audiences have two key modes of ‘intent’.
Subscribers = Informational intent:
“I want to consume content because I want to be entertained, educated or
informed.”
Customers = Transactional intent:
“I want to consume content because I’m looking for information to help me
complete a purchase decision.”

W a k e y o u r s u b s c r i b e r
a u d i e n c e u p !
Thinking about audience intent and how they
use that intent on social media, will help make
your content most relevant.

INFORMATIONAL INTENT
TRANSACTIONAL INTENT
Content
7
Content
6
Content
5
Content
4
Content
3
Content
2
Content 1
Create top and middle funnel
content for audiences with
informational intent.
This often does not mean they are
‘customers’.
Bottom of funnel content needs
to target your core target
customer with conversion
orientated content and strong
calls to action.
Retarget to audiences horizontally as
well as vertically. This provides
cadence and supports an ‘always-on’
approach, instead of a campaign.
SUBSCRIBERS
CUSTOMERS

0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
Month 1 Month 2 Month 3 Month 4 Month 5 Month 6 Month 7 Month 8 Month 9
Traffic / Conversions
Traffic
The Long Term Merit of Content
PAID AMPLIFICATION
(Sponsored Content)
ORGANIC PERFORMANCE
(SEO, 2nd Network Social Shares, Email, Dark Social, ‘Viral’)
As a customer, I’m still discovering and
converting from your content months later.
Report on performance in Month 1, Month 4
and Month 8 to see the long term
performance of your content and the organic
acquisitions it’s generating.
Also, consider re-amplifying those pieces
that are doing well.
Use the Optimisation
metrics to assess the
success of the
amplification spend.
Revisit the content to
measure any completed
Audience and Acquisition
goals in the 3 months post-
amplification.
Revisit the content to
measure any
completed Audience
and Acquisition goals 6
months on.

3 points to keep in mind with content reporting
1. Content is always on, unlike advertising.
2. With content cadence, your subscriber audience
compounds.
3.ROI from content marketing does not stop after 30 days (like
advertising). Revisit content every four months to gauge the
on-going long term revenue impact.

Content Archetypes:
THE POET
THE PROFESSOR
THE PREACHER
THE PROMOTER
Different types of content satisfy different types of audience intent. A good way to understand where in
the funnel to create content is to leverage variations of these four content archetypes
Source: “Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing” R. Rose & C. Johnson (2015)

Content that is:
 Entertaining
 Being Bold
 Breaks From The Brand
Driver: Emotion
Audience Intent: Informational
THE POET

Content that is:
 Thought Leadership
 Opinion / Controversy
 Teaches, don’t just inform
Driver: Data
Audience Intent: Informational
THE PROFESSOR

Content that is:
 Evergreen and Topical
 How To’s / Top 10 Lists
 Inform and Educate
Driver: Audience Pain/Passion Points
Audience Intent: Informational /
Transactional
THE PREACHER

Content that is:
 About the branded
 Talks about company and people
 Products and services
Driver: Conversion
Audience Intent: Transactional
THE PROMOTER

INFORMATIONAL INTENT
TRANSACTIONAL INTENT
Content
7
Content
6
Content
5
Content
4
Content
3
Content
2
Content 1
Content types with
informational intent:
 Poet content
 Preacher content
 Professor content
Content types with
transactional intent:
 Promoter content

We are very good at creating Promoter content because we
love to talk about our brand and products. This content only
targets those with transactional intent.
But there is value in using Poet, Professor and Preacher
content to attract those who don’t want your products; just
information.
The goal here is to attract subscribers who could influence
your customers, or develop trust in your brand so they
themselves become a customer…

Ways to identify ‘Subscriber’ Lead Scoring
User actions
 Completes a Subscription goal (Newsletter)
 Likes/ Follows/Subscribes to Page
 Regular advocacy (shares, comments)
Additional Indicators
 Returning visits (+4) in a set time frame (1
month)
 Repeatedly views middle-of-the-funnel
articles
 Scroll tracking vs Time on Site
 MQL from a content asset (download,
registration)
‘Subscribers’ expect interaction and cadence so treat your
social media as always-on, conversation platforms.

B2B & Account-based marketing should aim to attract Subscribers
who are members of the business’ ‘buying committee’
CMO peer/competitor in
another organization
An industry influencer who recommends the product
A team member who needs
the product
The CIO of his
organization
Customer
(B2B Decision maker)
His own customers who
demand better service (and the
product could help)

Someone downloading a whitepaper does not always mean they are a
‘lead’. What is the intent of their download paired with lead scoring?
“Subscriber”
Probably not a lead
Influencer download Committee DownloadsDecision maker download
“Subscriber” / Customer
Possible lead
“Subscriber” / Customer
Possible lead

Ok, but why waste time and resources creating content
for people who won’t buy my products?
AKA, how will subscribers make me money?

Return on Investment (ROI) for subscribers happens in two primary
ways:
Lead
Score
They become customers of
existing products
They become customer
of new products
USE VANITY METRICS TO OPTIMISE FOR BOTH GOALS
ROI
Subscribers become customers
when they trust the brand and the
time is right for them.
Short term ROI
Subscribers allow you to better research
your audience, which you use to build a
monetized ‘content product’ that they want.
Long term ROI
Subscriptions RetentionAttendancesDownloadsAttribution

FAB-Beauty.com
www.fab-beauty.com
 WHAT: Unbranded content hub by L’Oreal
 Audience: Hairdressers and salon owners
 Objective: To create content for the hairdressing community in
order to research that community
 How: Attract subscribers to the website / email and research this
audience on how hairdressers network, consume products, and
what they care about
 Why? To better understand the target audience, then optimise
L’Oreal products based on audience data. Helps sell more
product to those who influence individual customers about hair
care.

Ways to Make Money With Content Marketing
1. Improve leads and transactions on
existing products
(Acquisition ROI)
2. Charge tickets to events /
webinars for your target
audience
$399 - $1,899 USD pp

3. Sell Display on your content hub /
Pre-roll YouTube advertising
4. Create new products your
subscribers want
Stars Wars fans + merchandise = $5 Billion +

5. Monetize the subscription (Premium
content / print version / book)
6. Diversify your businesses

The ‘Content Product’ is a potential new revenue stream brought by
your subscriber audience.
Audience Platforms Analytics / CRM Tool
Like
Click /
CTR
Lead
MQL /
SQL
Impression /
CPM
Share /
Earned Reach
Comments /
Sentiment /
Engagement
Traffic
On-page
Engagement
Sale /
Transaction
Subscriber
Loyalty
Engagement
ROI METRICS
SUBSCRIBER
METRICS
VANTIY METRICS
Content
Revenue

Metric Objectives KPIs LinkedIn Products
Subscriber
Audience
Bucket
Subscription
Generating a loyal audience base to be
used to research and survey.
Event Registrations
Generating attendees to events, both paid
and free events.
Whitepaper Download
Generating a database of content
subscribers and brands with potential
conversion intent.
• Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)
• Subscriptions
• Return visitor rate
• Email subscription rate
• Social following growth
• Avg. pieces of content read by
subscriber
• Retargeting audience retention
rate
• Downloads of content assets
• Dwell time
• Sign ups to events
• Page depth
• Content consuming behaviours
• Followers
• Showcase Pages
• Company Pages
• Publishing
• Sponsored Content
• Sponsored InMail
• Conversion Tracking
• Retargeting
Some ‘subscriber’ metrics to use to report common goals.

Showing Impact to decision
makers
Making the business case
FIVE
Daniel Hochuli @logocracycopyPART 5: Showing Impact to decision makers

The Difference Between Data & Insight
An insight prescribes specific
actions
An insight answers the question “so
what?”
and motivates action
Data doesn’t answer the
question “so what?”
An insight speaks directly to
whatever the audience cares about
Data doesn’t care who the
audience isData
Insights
Actions So What Audience
Data doesn’t prescribe any specific
actions
Daniel Hochuli @logocracycopyPART 5: Showing Impact

4 Key Rules of Reporting Insight
1. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
2. Know your audience and adapt your reporting
3. What is the “So What?”

Valuation that you
are trending right
Request
feedback from
the date
INFORM ENQUIRE
To confirm at
hypotheses or
pathways
The opportunity
the data presents
DECIDE
INSPIRE
SO
WHAT?

Optimization
metrics, not
‘vanity’ metrics Many audiences move
horizontally in the
funnel, retarget both
vertically and
horizontally.
Develop a multi-
channel attribution
model that works for
you
Ensure you set up
both Customer
Acquisition and
Content Audience
goals
Give
Executives
Insights, not
data
Optimization metrics
can be use to test and
answer hypotheses
Revisit old
content every 4
months
Consider the
potential of a content
product and new
revenue streams
Key Takeaways
Use LinkedIn
Conversion
Tracking
KISS
Keep It Simple
Stupid

Content Marketing Measurement and How To Show Impact With Content Metrics

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